[benj111]

I never understood why nation states pay outside companies for this stuff. You need the expertise to actually evaluate what you're getting anyway. Incentives are in no way aligned. At the state level you have the scale to do it in house.

[Symbiote]

If a senior government employee can get a very expensive Palantir contract approved, they have a good chance of a much better paid job at Palantir in the future:

https://www.thenational.scot/news/26055524.palantir-hired-30...

[tencentshill]

That might be worth its own post

[maeln]

This is a paradox that you see in many countries. I work for a private company that make software for the public sector in France, so I am very familiar with the subject. And to be fair, there are many cases where using contractor does make a lot of sense (seasonality or infrequent demands, shared resources, etc). But a lot of the population sees public spending as the biggest evil. This lead to the public sector putting a huge pressure on their biggest spending : payroll. This means fewer employees and worse pay. That makes the public sector not attractive to talent and unable to create a workforce for specific project that should have been fully in control of the public entity. Due to this, the public sector often has to go through private contractor, which ironically often cost more than if you had the skills internally. But increase the number of employee in your municipality and a part of the taxpayers are going to crucify you (somehow they are ok with paying millions to private contractors though). The internal vs. external spending is a difficult one and there is a lot of subtlety to it. Sadly, in the public discourse it is often reduced to "public spending bad" or "everything should be nationalized".

[SXX]

Because "nation states" are not one making decision either. It's done by one specific career bureaucrat or group of them and even best of people who work on such positions usually choose it because of job security and stability.

Spending 10x more on IBM or Palantir can't get them fired, but trying to build something in-house their organization don't have competence for can get them fired.

And this is even if you don't take lobbying or corruption into account.

[InsideOutSanta]

> It's done by one specific career bureaucrat or group

Almost all governments have a legally defined public procurement framework. If this is overridden, it's pretty much always by elected politicians, not by regular government employees.

[SXX]

  > Almost all governments have a legally defined public procurement framework.

These frameworks are all created and administered by same career bureaucrats.

  > If this is overridden, it's pretty much always by elected politicians, not by regular government employees.

Why they need to overridden in first place? Using of consultancy services is not usually banned.

Also it's not like 4 years ago either UK or EU governments would expect they will soon want to get rid of all US companies in their public sector.

[convolvatron]

I've worked both sides of a 'transparent open-process lowest cost bid' for the US government, and it's pretty easy to get the outcome you want. a lot of the time its not even for reasons of overt corruption, just that that's the vendor you've chosen to work with.

[pjc50]

Yes, and: often they're prevented from building it in house!

[SXX]

In some countries yeah. In UK almost all of gov.uk even hosted on github with public commit history.

But its kind a obvious why some system for refugees was outsourced for consultancy.

[Silhouette]

The GDS is one of the more credible parts of government IT in the UK and IME generally well respected. The government websites and online services have largely been well done. But there are limits on how much that organisation can take on with the resources it has and it's still subject to the same challenges around compensation and working environment I mentioned in another comment that make it difficult to hire and retain good people. Unfortunately it's not realistic to build all government IT projects in house that way at the moment.

[SXX]

As far as I get it GDS cant just build things fast for the reasons you mention and refugee situation look like reasonable one to outsource it.

[mike_hearn]

Buy: you need expertise in contracts and knowing what you need.

Build: you need expertise in contracts, knowing what you need and also software development.

It's obviously easier to buy than build, especially for civil service roles where they can't attract the best developers due to political/ideological constraints.

[benj111]

>knowing what you need.

But if you have a government department that builds software, they can also spec it. And everyones interests are aligned.

Further you open the door to bell labs/DARPA type speculative work.

Seems to me, the type of work environment where you have that freedom, are able to open source work would be attractive to a lot of people.

[e12e]

The catch is that if you don't know software development, you probably don't know what you need...

[esperent]

Plausible deniability. "We paid £5 million for consultants who recommended this system, it's not our fault it turned out to be a steaming pile of crap that wasted £20 million and took 3 years".

[throwaway173738]

More like “we did exactly what our constituents wanted and bought a system to do this instead of hiring a team to do this.”

[bko]

Isn't it obvious? Because governments aren't good at management. There's no incentive or feedback loop. A company goes out of business if it's operationally a mess or doesn't deliver value. Not always but it's highly correlated. Governments face no pressure like this. Maybe mild pressure on the very local level. But when you get to the national level, orgs like the Pentagon misplace trillions of dollars with not so much of a protest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Accountability_Offi...

[mondrian]

The irony in your example is the modern Pentagon is largely a collection of private companies.

[philipallstar]

Everything is eventually private. Each employee is a private individual. That doesn't matter. What matters is how money is collected, and if it's forced out of people by tax, instead of being handed over voluntarily, there's no incentive to be good.

[throwthrowuknow]

A collection of private companies contracted and administered by government.

[pjc50]

See my comment on the AI replacing consultants story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48133728

[xyzzy123]

If you get someone else to do it you are not responsible for failure.

[nielsbot]

if Palantir (or other consultancies) are friends with government decision makers (especially in the US) then spending more on a service is a feature, not a bug.

[lII1lIlI11ll]

UK is not a "nation state".

[shimman]

They do this because the UK is a failing nation state (it's poorer than the USA state of Missouri) that needs to make goodwill with any country willing to trade with it. So of course they will go full tilt into USA branch of neoliberalism. Expect them to talk about privatizing more of the NHS to "save the budget" too come 2030.

[philipallstar]

> They do this because the UK is a failing nation state (it's poorer than the USA state of Missouri)

Can you cite this, please?